Lavabit Announces Relaunch of Secure, Open Source Email

by Ben Pearson

January 23rd, 2017

Ladar Levinson received considerable attention in 2013 when he was forced to shut down Lavabit, the email service he provides, as a result of actions from the US federal government related to the email account of Edward Snowden. Instead of being forced to implement back-door that could potentially harm all of the company’s users, Levinson decided to ultimately shut down his business entirely.

In 2014, Levinson successfully launched a crowdfunding campaign to create DIME, an open source secure end-to-end communications platform for asynchronous messaging across the Internet. Now, he has announced the relaunch of Lavabit using this same protocol, and has opened the service to users that previously had an account, with access for new users being planned for the near future.